Posted on 08/31/2009 3:02:57 AM PDT by Kaslin
Edward Kennedy was buried Saturday, the last son of Joseph and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the longest-serving member of the only royal political family our democratic republic has ever produced. Those who remember the 1960s understand viscerally, even if they do not share themselves, the almost mystical devotion the Kennedys inspired. Those who do not find it harder to understand, and those who come after us may find it utterly mystifying.
But it was real. Other political families -- the Adamses, the Harrisons, the Tafts -- produced multiple generations of national politicians but generated nothing like mass enthusiasm. The sons of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt set out on political careers but never got very far.
The Kennedy boys -- John, Robert and Edward -- were different. They won three elections to the House, 12 elections to the Senate and one to the presidency. From 1960 to 1980, they were major presences, active or off to the side, in every presidential contest.
This was the work initially of the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, a self-made millionaire, hyper-ambitious for his sons, who manipulated the media with aplomb. Joseph Kennedy invited himself to the apartment of Henry Luce, the proprietor of Time and Life, to watch the coverage of his son's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in 1960. He also arranged to have a new car parked in the driveway of Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of The New York Times. The result was fabulous media coverage not just of the candidate but of the extended Kennedy family, as well. A republic elects men (and women) to hold office. A monarchy celebrates a royal family.
And this was a charming and youthful family. For 18 years before the 1960 election, Americans had presidents in their 60s. At his inauguration, John Kennedy was 43 and his wife 31, with infant children. "Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated in one person doing interesting actions," wrote Walter Bagehot in 1867. "A family on the throne is an interesting idea also. It also brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life." And so Vaughn Meader's record satirizing "the first family" and their unusual accents topped the charts and was played over and over at parties.
Once his son was elected president, Joseph Kennedy insisted that his sons Robert and Edward become, despite their thin credentials, attorney general and U.S. senator. Naturally, there was speculation that they would follow their brother to the White House in quasi-royal succession, something never contemplated before in American history.
After the assassinations of John Kennedy in 1963 and Robert Kennedy in 1968, there were great hopes of a Kennedy restoration, to the point that Mayor Richard Daley offered the Democratic presidential nomination to the 36-year-old Edward Kennedy at the 1968 Chicago convention. Kennedy's failure to report the fatal accident at Chappaquiddick the next year ended his chance at being president, permanently, as it became clear in 1980, when he lost his challenge to Jimmy Carter. But he persevered and became a hard-working, liberal legislator, as many have recalled in their tributes in the past week.
As candidate and president, John Kennedy was hawkish on foreign policy, cautious on civil rights, with a domestic program that included tax cuts on high earners. How the Kennedys came to be associated not with his cool centrism but with a passionate liberalism has been explained best by James Piereson in his subtle and penetrating book "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism."
In the process, a royal political family that seemed to command widespread support -- after he endorsed the civil rights bill in June 1963, John Kennedy's job approval ranged up toward the 70s, except among white Southerners -- came to be associated with the left end of the political spectrum. Edward Kennedy, for all his ability at legislative deal-making, became a polarizing political figure.
The next generation of Kennedys has had mostly disappointing political careers. Joe Kennedy and Patrick Kennedy made it to Congress; Kathleen Townsend and Mark Shriver failed to do so; Maria Shriver made it to the governor's mansion in Sacramento, but Townsend failed to do so in Annapolis; Caroline Kennedy will not follow her father and uncles in the Senate.
I suspect the royal status the Kennedys temporarily achieved in our democratic republic will seem bizarre to future generations. Perhaps it already does even for those of us who can remember the 1960s.
Given the coverage the incumbent president is getting, orgive me if I’m skeptical about that.
The difference is Obama is an emperor with no clothes - and it is becoming apparent even to the blind...
It’s a media thang.
In America, the royalty is made by the media by kissing up.
In Britain, the media delight on the foibles of the royalty, but the royalty do not fear losing their status because it isn’t based on the media.
I am not so sure yet.
I think that the difference between the media handling of Kennedy and Obama lies in the fact that the adulation of the Kennedy’s in the ‘sixties was due to who they were- an incredibly wealthy and chic young family appearing in a more naive time than it is now. The Obama coverage springs from the fact that the family is black which assuages leftist guilt, and that President Obama is a light skinned black who does not speak like steppin fetch-it. I believe Mr. Obama would like to be thought of as Kennedy-esque President, which is works very hard to accomplish unfortunately.
The media coronated this family and they were suitable representatives of the lack of morality in the media.
And then there are those of us who never gave a fig for the Kennedys from the get-go.
JFK stole an election; sent a brigade of young Cubans across a beach, lost his nerve, cancelled their air support, and abandoned them; plunged the country into Vietnam; abandoned the balanced budget orthodoxy that had until then been dominant in both parties in peacetime, with the exception of FDR; was a sexual predator; and was an utterly ineffective legislator. I will give him credit for cutting taxes, but his substantive record is mostly negative. Absent the assassination, this would be the historical verdict.
On the other hand, he was personally charming, photogenic, fronted for a nicely written ghost-written book, and gave a nice speech. Post-assassination, this made him a god to the media, and to the democrat party.
Bobby and Teddy were non-entities propelled by sheer post-assassination sentimentality. That this lasted so long is simpy collective insanity.
Nice roundup on the Kennedy mythz... we can only hope that overplay memorials for the ultimate sleazebag Fat Teddy will quickly be exposed for more Moron Media lying!
Thanks to the free media!
No other politician would have been allowed to get away with what Kennedy got away with.
I seem to recall that the “self-made” millionaire made his millions as a smuggler and bootlegging? DemonRAT politics is a natural progression, though some wait to engage in organized crime until after they get in office.
In massachusetts we have an example where the vast majority of liberals there need to be institutionalized to protect America from their insanity.
The entire Kennedy Camelot “mystique” was the product of clever exploitation of the new medium of television by the best political marketing organization Joe Kennedy Sr’s money could buy. None of the Kennedys ever really ran for political office in the hitherto conventional sense; rather they were marketed to the American public as “political products” in very the same manner as toothpaste, underarm deodorant, or new cars.
An important book still remains to be written about this marketing of the Kennedy illusion.
Joseph Kennedy, a self-made millionaire,Illegal booze runner.
“Those who remember the 1960s understand viscerally, even if they do not share themselves, the almost mystical devotion the Kennedys inspired. “
And when it’s not the Kennedys it’s the Obamas. There are enough people in this country who don’t worship God, thereby leaving their worshipper waving in the wind and fixating on whatever demonic idol presents itself.
Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, The Beatles - anything will do for their worshipping antennas to get a fix on.
The Death of Ted Kennedy and as Barone writes, the Death of an American experiment with nobility, these also correspond with the Death of Obama, politically, for he will not recover, his polls will drop, he will either quit, be thrown out of office as a usurper, or be impeached and thrown out, or he will lose in 2012.
Obama was a Kennedy. They said it! He suggested it, again and again. He rode that same political tide, that’s why he spoke in Berlin. “I’m the black JFK!”
Well, he isn’t, yet the fortunes of the Kennedys and Obama are chained together — both are sinking into a cold briny deep quickly.
Excellent post.
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